“The effect of a thoughtful test scores policy ought to be exactly what Yale described when it announced its recent decision: The students across racial and socioeconomic groups most likely to excel become those most likely to be admitted. Diversity, meanwhile, doesn’t suffer. Such an outcome is possible: Most research on the past years’ test-optional […]
“There are a few points that are incontestable about Stiles’s four categories of achievement. First, they together comprise what is almost certainly the first documented grading system in the history of American education… Second, the clear purpose of this mode of evaluation was to publicly rank and sort students according to their achievement, not to […]
“Three Dartmouth economists and a sociologist then dug into the numbers. One of their main findings did not surprise them: Test scores were a better predictor than high school grades — or student essays and teacher recommendations — of how well students would fare at Dartmouth… A second finding was more surprising. During the pandemic, […]
“This is NOT a “martyr” post about how much I graded… More than anything, I wanted to fully capture something that I know is a reality for countless teachers, and to share a bit about what this looks like for me in the current moment.”
“Kim has spent the past few years developing playful assessments for the classroom, originally with teachers, teacher trainees and game designers at MIT. Where Shute, her mentor at Florida State University, called it “stealth assessment,” Kim prefers the term “playful assessment.””
“Without test scores, admissions officers sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between applicants who are likely to do well at elite colleges and those who are likely to struggle. Researchers who have studied the issue say that test scores can be particularly helpful in identifying lower-income students and underrepresented minorities who will thrive. These students […]
“To successfully implement reassessment options, educators must have in-depth knowledge of the theory and research that justifies the reassessment process, along with clear notions of the elements that must be in place to ensure it works.”
“Many commenters said, in no uncertain terms, that students need to be held accountable for their academics and behavior… They said policies like the 50 percent rule were unfair… And that leniency didn’t prepare young people for post-high school success… But some saw the benefits of a “grade floor” in certain situations… While others suggested […]
“What all this means is that human thinking can be made explicitly visible if we invite students to do work complex enough to be worthy of our unique, organic cognitive capacities. Based on this research, I recommend the following indicators as a way to verify and evaluate an assessment or performance task’s level of complexity:”
“The course will launch for credit next fall, and is currently being taught as a pilot program in 700 schools across 40 states… African American studies is an interdisciplinary field, melding history with the study of contemporary politics, culture and law.”
“Digital storytelling projects—like those I’ve used with my students—can help teachers connect the curriculum to their communities, and help students make connections across disciplines and to their own lives. At a time when artificial intelligence has everyone wondering about the future of writing instruction, digital storytelling projects like those outlined here and discussed in my […]
“These test takers were high school freshmen when the coronavirus pandemic interrupted their educations, sending many of them into months of online learning. The achievement declines on the ACT are broadly in line with pandemic-era trends from other national exams… And yet, it is difficult to interpret the scores because of sweeping changes in college […]
“Just passing students on without ensuring that they’ve learned what they need to learn is obviously not just demoralizing for teachers, but potentially has devastating consequences for our society.”
“Historically, the SAT gave students “too much to cover and not enough time to do it,” the College Board’s chief executive officer, David Coleman, told me. But developing a digital version gave them the opportunity to experiment. And the results were so impressive they decided to stick with them. Starting next year, the test is […]
“Combating grade inflation, however difficult in practice, is actually the easier of the two existing problems ChatGPT has exacerbated. More difficult is coming to agreement on what exactly we are evaluating in student papers. It seems to me that every discipline will have to engage in their own process of discerning what they want from […]
“Essentially, you enter in a question and a chart is created that shows what supports, opposes, or could go either way in terms of values, rights, and duties. The researchers made clear that the goal was not to help people make decisions, but rather to explore and unpack how ethical choices are made and categorized.”
“The movement for high academic standards—determinations of what students should know and be able to do across subjects and grade levels—promised to center teaching and learning on common themes across schools and raise expectations for all students. Standards have shaped the teaching and learning landscape in American schools, dictating everything from curriculum content to assessment […]
““Grading is evaluation, putting a value on something,” says Denise Pope, Ed.M.’89, a senior lecturer at Stanford who runs a project called Challenge Success. Pope stresses, however, that grades are not the same as assessment, and to really talk about grading, we have to make the distinction between the two terms.”
“While both low- and high-stakes group assessments offer broad accountability and transparency, parents can still get a sense of their child’s learning if they know what to look at.”
“The College Board has steered its signature test, the SAT, through celebrity bribery scandals, international cheating rings, rain-induced Scantron malfunctions, the rise of the rival ACT, and a steady onslaught of bad P.R. But the covid-19 pandemic presented a new kind of crisis.”
“The office’s research had shown that the university “cannot reliably predict students will do well at MIT unless we consider standardized test results alongside grades, coursework, and other factors.”
“When teachers evaluated student writing using a general grade-level scale, they were 4.7 percentage points more likely to consider the white child’s writing at or above grade level compared to the identical writing from a Black child. However, when teachers used a grading rubric with specific criteria, the grades were essentially the same.”
“Framing excellence in these competitive terms doesn’t lead to improvements in performance. Indeed, a consistent body of social science research shows that competition tends to hold us back from doing our best. It creates an adversarial mentality that makes productive collaboration less likely, encourages gaming of the system and leads all concerned to focus not on meaningful […]
“The dehumanizing message of the new adversity index is that America’s young people are nothing but interchangeable sociological points of data — and the jagged complexity of an individual life somehow can be sanded down, quantified and fairly contrasted.”
Just as feeding more people more efficiently has led us into a feedback loop in which we constantly erode our own global supply of fish, educating more children more efficiently has yielded a shell game of metrics that have allowed us to falsely claim success (or failure), when in fact all we have been doing […]
“We do have a little bit of a Wild West situation right now with alternative credentials,” said Alana Dunagan… Thousands of credentials classes aimed at improving specific skills have cropped up outside of traditional colleges. Some classes are boot camps, including those popular with computer coders. Others are even more narrowly focused, such as courses on factory […]
“Applicants to Vista companies, from the entry to the senior-executive levels, are subjected to a timed standardized test. Testing, Smith says, helps his companies find talented people—people the competition has overlooked because their résumé lacked certain credentials or because of the inherent biases of managers.”
“The trend toward impact measurement is mostly positive, but the push to demonstrate impact has also wasted resources, compromised monitoring efforts in favor of impact evaluation, and contributed to a rise in poor and even misleading methods of demonstrating impact.”
In education, decision makers are often motivated by the desire to improve student outcomes and increase educational equity. Yet both “student outcomes” and “equity” are vague terms… Without more precise understandings of which outcomes we care about and which distributions of those outcomes are fair, decision makers lack orientation. Their decisions may end up relying […]
The country is a noteworthy case study for thinking about the shortcomings of a theoretically meritocratic system in which rote memorization is prized above critical-thinking skills and resilience, oftentimes taking a severe toll on students’ mental health.”
How do we know whether School X is living up to its values? The answer is surprisingly simple, and yet many schools fail to do it: Ask the students.”
To level the playing field and maintain validity, it should end the pretense that the SAT is timed, throw away the clocks, hire more proctors, and give all students as much time as they want or need. If timing is essential, the College Board better get to work to protect the validity of its prize […]
That many scientific discoveries were stumbled upon by accident is no accident at all. We all need time and space to get ever so slightly lost, to dream our way into creative thought, and to develop our richest insights. This is true of all learners, expert or novice.”
From 1998 to 2016, the average high school GPA went up from 3.27 to 3.38. Notably, the gains were unequal among high schools, and the differences appear to favor students from wealthier (and whiter) high schools than average.”
While some include the traits on traditional report cards, others include them on progress reports they send home periodically. Most schools ask teachers to craft the student ratings using a variety of questionnaires.”
“When we say CBE, we’re typically refer to three different things,” says Fisher: philosophy, policy and practice. There are debates within each of those lenses—and aligning all three may well be impossible.”